People increasingly rely on the Internet for business and personal use. As individuals and organizations provide more services via the Internet, there arise more opportunities for malicious parties to exploit these services to illegitimate ends. For example, malicious parties may propagate spam, malware, phishing attacks, and/or misleading information. In another example, malicious parties may consume resources provided by resources intended for legitimate users.
In some cases, the cost of exploiting Internet services and resources may be small or even negligible for the malicious parties compared to the harm done and/or the potential gain for the malicious parties. For example, a malicious party may use multiple bots, automated agents, and/or zombie systems to exploit Internet services and resources. Alternatively, a malicious party may manually register multiple fake accounts to exploit an Internet service or resource. Because some Internet services may be designed with and/or operate on the assumption that each registered account represents a unique user, these services may reduce potential exploits by better differentiating between unique people and redundant or fake accounts. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for identifying unique people may prove either insufficient (e.g., using email validations) or overly intrusive (e.g., requiring a credit card authorization). Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for verifying user identities.